If the Trump administration hoped to convince senators on Thursday that the American strike on Iranian nuclear facilities last weekend was a complete success, they’ll have to keep trying.
“We don’t know,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal — a Connecticut Democrat and member of the Armed Services Committee — after a briefing with senior Trump officials on Capitol Hill. “Anybody who says we know with certainty is making it up, because we have no final battle damage assessment.”
The briefing about the attack concluded with lawmakers questioning whether the United States will find itself confronting a renewed Iranian nuclear program in just a few months. Republicans praised the administration for the strike, and Democrats expressed some cautious optimism that Iran won’t be able to create nuclear weapons. But most agreed more work is needed to constrain Iran.
“I’m hopeful that we did as much damage as possible, because a nuclear-armed Iran is an unacceptable threat to the world,” Blumenthal said. “I’m rooting for success.”
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GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a longtime Iran hawk, left the briefing wanting to see even more of a confrontation with the Iranian regime.
“You’re not going to get religious Nazis to give up their nuclear ambitions by talking to them,” he said. “You have to weaken them. You have to put them on their knees.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared at the briefing for senators, hours after he slammed news outlets for reporting on a leaked intelligence assessment that indicated Iranian nuclear capabilities hadn’t been “totally obliterated” by the strike, as President Donald Trump has said. Senators said as they left that the intelligence isn’t totally clear on the extent of the damage.
“We do not want Iran to have the capability to build a nuclear weapon,” said Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel. But “it is going to take time to get a final assessment.”
Warner said he worried Trump had jumped to a conclusion too soon when he lauded how successful the attack had been, possibly providing “a false sense of comfort.”
“To get to the point where Iran does not have the ability to enrich uranium that could possibly be used for military purposes, you’re going to need diplomacy,” he argued.
“You’re going to need inspectors on the ground,” Warner continued. “Some of the enriched uranium was never going to be taken out by a bunker buster bomb.”
And Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said he simply doesn’t believe Trump “was telling the truth when he said this program was obliterated.”
“Ultimately, the only way to truly constrain Iran’s nuclear program is diplomacy,” Murphy argued. “You cannot bomb knowledge out of existence, no matter how many scientists you kill.”
Republicans expressed confidence in the strike, saying the future mostly depends on how Iranian leaders react.
“What we don’t know is what the response from the Iranians will be,” Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, told reporters after the briefing. “We clearly deliver results, and we are very good at what we do.”
“There’s a real opportunity for diplomacy to occur — if the Iranians decide they want diplomacy,” he added.
Hegseth was joined by CIA director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s acting national security adviser.
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton of Arkansas praised the service members who carried out the attack, calling it a “brilliantly executed mission.”
“It’s safe to say that we have struck a major blow, alongside our friends in Israel, against Iran’s nuclear program,” Cotton told reporters. “That is going to make America safer, our friends in the region safer and protect the world from the risk of an Iranian nuclear weapon for years.”
“We’ve caused catastrophic damage to Iran’s nuclear program,” he said, before adding: “That’s not to say they might not try to reconstitute it sometime.”
“If they do, then all options will remain on the table,” Cotton warned.
John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.
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